The main takeaway is that the State deptartment role is certainly not about diplomacy. There’s lots of mentions of stirring up crap as part of the routine game. Chaos is a desired end goal, so long as it’s controlled or directed.

page 7: North Korea:

We don’t want the North Koreans to
cause more trouble than the system can absorb. So
we’ve got a pretty good thing going with the
previous North Korean leaders

What an interesting statement. The corollary seems to be that they do want North Korea to be stirring up trouble. It serves to distract and limit China for example, a point made in other parts of the speech.

page 13: Syria:

So the problem for the US and the
Europeans has been from the very beginning: What
is it you — who is it you are going to try to arm?
And you probably read in the papers my view was we
should try to find some of the groups that were
there that we thought we could build relationships
with and develop some covert connections that might
then at least give us some insight into what is
going on inside Syria.

It is well known now that the US has been arming the “Free Syrian Army”, funnelling weapons in through Turkey via the Saudis. Here Hillary is discussing exactly this process. She actually expresses regret that the US isn’t as good at this discrete covert warmongering as they used to be.

page 14: Libya:

In Libya we didn’t have that problem.
It’s a huge place. The air defenses were not that
sophisticated and there wasn’t very — in fact,
there were very few civilian casualties.

A psychopath in action. I hear of Hillary’s carpet bombing of Libya discussed as one of the most brutal and destructive campaigns in near history, and she describes it as “very few casualties”. I don’t actually know the numbers, but it’s certainly interesting to see how casual she is with respect to the death of civilians.

page 15: on Iran? (or perhaps Syria):

Well, you up the pain
that they have to endure by not in any way
occupying or invading them but by bombing their
facilities. I mean, that is the option. It is not
as, we like to say these days, boots on the ground.

Causal talk of bombing other countries is so disgusting. Notice how the word facilities is very vague. Decoding this a bit, if you are simultaneously talking about “upping the pain” and bombing facilities, this is probably theorizing about bombing targets that have the most terror inducing and hardship effects on the civilians (water processing, energy production, schools, hospitals, …). But that’s okay so long as it isn’t perceived as “boots on the ground”.

page 36: Russia:

And finally on Afghanistan and Russia.
Look, I would love it if we could continue to build
a more positive relationship with Russia. I worked
very hard on that when I was Secretary, and we made
some progress with Medvedev, who was president in
name but was obviously beholden to Putin, but Putin
kind of let him go and we helped them get into the
WTO for several years, and they were helpful to us
in shipping equipment, even lethal equipment, in
and out of out of Afghanistan.

Russia was a useful ally when they helped with covert wars. Now that those covert wars are knocking on Russia’s door, the relationship has soured. It’s hard to imagine why that relationship has deteriorated.

It is also a discouraging book, and hard to stomach, and downright depressing. It is, however, encyclopedic, thorough, and contains extensive references. If you ever wanted a detailed list of US atrocities to counter arguments that governments, military, and intelligence agencies serve us positively, this book has everything on the shopping list.

There is a huge disparity between popular and media perception of the USA and what is presented in this book. This disparity brings to mind the paradigm shift discussion of Kuhn’s “Structure of scientific revolutions”. The perception of the USA (or its NATO and economic puppets like Canada) as freedom loving “democracy” is so indoctrinated into us that to accept the reality that exactly the opposite is true requires a complete paradigm shift. It is too painful to realize that we have to totally discard our current world view, and be willing to accept the pain and discomfort associated with the mental revolution required to see the actual state of the world. Kuhn also points out that such a revolution isn’t going to happen until people have a ready made alternative to the current paradigm. The history of warfare and evil in our world is so pervasive, that I don’t think we have a ready made model of peaceful interaction available for this switch, and are therefore willing to overlook the errors of the current model. I think that this book details enough of those errors that it puts the current world view on shaky ground.
I find this author to be is an extremely effective communicator. A sample of his style can be found in this 2002 speech.

The speech above also contains a quote from the intro in “Rogue State” that I found particularly striking:

“If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize — very publicly and very sincerely — to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and impoverished, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. Then I would announce that America’s global interventions have come to an end and inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the union but -– oddly enough -– a foreign country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to our victims and repair the damage from our bombings. There would be enough money. Do you know what one year’s military budget is equal to? One year. It’s equal to more than $20,000 per hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born.

That’s what I’d do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I’d be assassinated.”